Carrier aggregation is a Third Generation Partnership Project (“3GPP”) feature defined for the Long Term Evolution Advanced (“LTE-A”) standard. Carrier aggregation allows data to be simultaneously transmitted via multiple carriers to a single user equipment (“UE”). The UE connects to a primary serving cell and one or more secondary serving cells. The primary serving cell is where the UE establishes the radio resource control (“RRC”) connection and where the physical uplink control channel (“PUCCH”) is used. The secondary serving cells can be monitored by the UE for downlink assignment and/or to transmit uplink data. The UE typically establishes an RRC connection only to the primary serving cell and will only transmit PUCCH (i.e., uplink control information) to the primary serving cell. The secondary serving cell(s), on the other hand, can be used to transmit downlink control information and data over the physical downlink control channel (“PDCCH”) and the physical downlink shared channel (“PDSCH”) and can receive uplink data via the physical uplink shared channel (“PUSCH”).
Carrier aggregation provides several benefits. Some benefits provided by carrier aggregation include increased downlink speed across the coverage area, more efficient use of radio spectrum, higher capacity, and increased throughput on the uplink. The current iteration of carrier aggregation does not offer flexible and granular carrier aggregation control. For example, if a voice-over-LTE (“VoLTE”) application is running on a UE, carrier aggregation is deactivated for all communications by the UE, regardless of whether other services may benefit from carrier aggregation on the UE.